Jane Burn

The scent of citrus fills the quiet room as socks swing from the radiant mantelpiece – a conga line of Nora Batty’s legs. Warmth

from the fireplace rises, dances them in its drift – when we are asleep on Christmas Eve, they make their own celebration, kick like a chorus line,

jingle their inner treats. Inside each toe, a bulge – year after year, tradition places it there. It waitsto be discovered, to offer its sweet to our lips.

Hull it as you would a brightly packaged gift. It’s sharp, delicious taste cuts through this day of bloat and richness. Here are vitamins,

here is something not foil-bound, not factory-bred,its bauble plucked from a laden tree. Pips swimthe juice of its breast, tell a story of birth. It’s wrap

will nourish compost, not clog up landfill with scrap. Thumb the centre, pare away each jewel. The segments were made to be offered. It asks to be shared.

The Year of Abandoned Self

by Jane Burn

I am become entirely used to the things my head invents – they might be visions of futures, of secrets, of hell. They might be prophetic – I ought to be writing them down. William Blake

saw angels in the trees – if it’s alright for him, it ought to be okayfor me. Ezekiel saw wings and faces, wheels in wheels. I saw this murky figure unfurl beneath a motorway bridge, clung like a bat,

one time I was tired near Gatwick, late at night. His lips were bone, his spew of garbage laughter spilled like sick – I think he was waiting for me to crash. I saw bundles of sheep as I walked on the path,

candy rainbow colours fleeced their happy backs – they were made from pixels, tiny squares of bubble and bright, like a Super Mario zoo. They smiled as I put my boot to their heads, trying to tamp them down –

it was a mockery. I saw a leather wingback chair melt around my friend, the burgundy run like blood – she had no idea, just drank her tea, told me this and that, all nonsense, of no matter fluff. I thought

I want to go home. If I stay longer, she’ll drown. I have given up thinking I have edges – I am soft as sea-mumbled stuff. I am meld.Listen to my rambling. All the ghosts – infestations in the corner

of my eyes like wisps, like smoke, are with me all the time. I’m a poor man’s Gormenghast, bargain basement Gundabad – come to the home of the cracked. I saw road signs pluck from tarmac roots

and run along with my car, grins on their flat metal faces, mouths made of zeroes, eyebrows made from fives. We sang it’s a small world after all, that Disney thing – quite merry, considering that I’m properly

fucking mad. Imagine keeping such secrets when you are dying to tell. The dogs help root through the woodpile for clues – they believe in everything I say, that’s how I know I’m right. I can’t remember

stashing all this broken glass. The woodlice nest like a plot, flit like troubled consciences, out of sight. I am paranoia, I am Armageddon. I’m beautiful, I’m a dungeon. I’m the second coming of Christ.

At eight-fifteen, the band stands up in regimented lines.July, before the schools break – the morning lull brokenby the stray parp of tuning notes, loud and suddenthrough nets ghosting open windows. It’s a signalto get up, throw cardigans over nighties, join the exodusof neighbours slopping feet in slippers, scratching bed hair.Slovenliness forgiven, this once – right now it means moreto be outside, listening to them play.

Dorothy – bitched about me once, with them at thirty-one,but if I cannot forgive her that, what use as a person am I?Her Arthur, taken by cancer in less than a year. Marie, lastof three sisters; a street full of women outliving their men.Sleepy-eyed kids, hurried out of their beds to hear the openingbars of Abide With Me, see The Banner, tassels of gold and red;For The People By The People. Your history, I tell my sons.Your village, see? This is why we don’t forget.

We were children when we lived through the last of the mines.Thatcher – strikes, scabs, picket lines; Arthur Scargillin Barnsley. The Dearne Valley villages – always the backdropof pit-heads, men in donkey jackets, orange panels bright amongallotment leeks. The scent of sparking fires – the sharp, oily smell;powder, staining everything it touched – grimy on the coal man’shessian skin, sooting the sacks on his flat-bed truck. Dad, quittingbefore it got too late, did not want the blackness settling on his lungs.

Wath Main, Wombwell, Hickleton, Manvers – given to nature now,flat under birds. Nineteen eighty-four. The corridors of our local compoverrun with cameras from the BBC – kids sticking two fingers upfor the telly. Tracy, from my year at school is missing and so areher brothers; Darren and Paul have been killed, while scavengingfor slack on Goldthorpe coal-tips. The funeral – playing the schoolsdented brass, my tongue dried up on the mouthpiece, metallicwith tears and tin. Brothers don’t die – they do not die beneath

embankments of smother and soot before they are sixteen, burstingtheir lungs under slag; their fathers fingers digging through the scree,nails split, skin torn. Blood and choke. The drummer strikes the skinof the bass drum. A sonic boom, as if Gabriel himself is smitingthe roofs of our estate. The troop moves down the hill – people,magnetised like iron filings follow the flag; dwindling to a lastearful of airborne notes, clear as crystal tears. Left behind,we swallow the thick in our throats; faces lit by zealot’s blaze.

There is nothing left. Stranded here and there a winding mechanism;giant upturned bogie wheels framed against the sky. Beamish tunnelto gawp at – to remind us of kiddies pulling up half-ton coal tubsin the dark; their lives lit by the whim of a candle's flame.

Gala Day, Durham Miners was previously published by Proletarian Poetry and is part of Jane's pamphlet, Fat Around The Middle.

Shops. Imagine them wanting shops. Wanting to buy stuff as if they are normal folk. Wanting to be just like us, with our popping out for bread and milk, fags, sweets, bsicuits, pop. Whatever. Imagine them needing food like that. Libraries. Imagine them wanting to read. As if they care about words, want to educate their children, pass the time. Time on their hands? What do they want time on their hands for? Surely they should be out working or something else. Cafes? Cafes? Like they are bothered about meeting up, sharing conversations, maybe even make friends. As if, as if it is fucking Butlins! I mean, are they ever going to go home if they’re living in some sort of holiday camp? They have a nightclub now. A nightclub. Imagine them wanting to sing and dance? Kara-bleedin’-oke? We like our revellers British, ta very much, our piss-heads local. This church, this beautiful, fragile, plastic sheet and wood-slat church, painted up with illuminated angels, simple cross on top. What's the actual? These scroungers are not Christians. Step off our white-skinned, fair faced God. Swathes! Swathes of them. Rats.Well done France, Stephen from Rugby says. Londonzone - hiding under an alias - is brisk. Good. The comment crows. Now finish the job.

Written in reaction to a newspaper story about the bulldozing of the settlement at Calais.

News

Culture Matters is pleased to announce that the third Bread and Roses Poetry Award, sponsored by Unite, is now open for entries. As in previous years, there will be 5 prizes of £100 for the best poems, and an anthology of the poems of around a further 20 entrants will be published later in the year. In addition, we are offering a mentoring and support package for writers who have not yet published a collection. Up to 3 of these entrants - who may or may not have won one of the 5 prizes - will be linked to an experienced, published poet, and they will be helped to produce their first published collection. They will also be invited, along with the winners of the 5 prizes, to launch their collections at the Teeside International Poetry Festival, to be held in Middlesbrough in April 2020. See article in the Poetry section for the full rules and guidelines.

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The arts are just a part of the weapons of life. Art can make us see and feel reality and help change that reality. Art is revelation. Art is hard work. Art is part of protest.

Jayne Cortez

Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.

Bertolt Brecht

The most precious thing in the sharp ebb and flow of the revolutionary waves is the proletariat's spiritual growth.

Rosa Luxemburg
Letters from Prison

The individual will reach full realization as a human creature, once the chains of alienation are broken. This will be translated concretely into the reconquering of one's true nature through liberated labor, and the expression of one's own human condition through culture and art,